No, this is not Citizen Kane. It's just a pleasant little romantic comedy with a business spin, in the realm of Baby Boom and Gung Ho. Renee Zellwegger does a fine job as the fish-out-of-water exec from Miami, come to do a hatchet job on a plant in a cold small town in Minnesota. Harry Connick, Jr. does very well in a non-musical role as the love interest, and as the representative of the union for a bit of conflict. A capable supporting cast keeps the smiles coming.

Predictable? Absolutely! Predictable gets a bad rap, actually. As those of us who watch movies more than once (and there are a lot of us) must expect predictable, right? After all, we have seen it before!

Corny? Without a doubt! But corny is not always bad. Think of how many corny movies you've enjoyed.

Enjoyable? Well, it was for me.

Lucy Hill (Renée Zellweger) is an aggressive executive from Miami who's new in a freezing tiny little Minnesota town. She's a fish out of water in town to downsize half the plant. Only the workers aren't cooperating. Plant manager Stu (J.K. Simmons) takes advantage of her. The union rep Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr.) clashes with her right from the start.

This is an attempt at rom-com without any likability or chemistry. The jokes of Zellweger and the cold are more misses than hits. Nobody really shines in this one. They're mostly just competent. Like the weather, it takes awhile for anything to warm up here. It's a fairly flat effort, a flat 5/10 effort.

New in Town is a bland inoffensive rom-com that wants to channel the off beat spirit of Fargo without a murder mystery.

Rene Zellweger is Lucy Hill, a troubleshooter sent by headquarters from her base in tropical Miami to turn round an under performing food processing factory in Minnesota.

Hill soon finds that the weather is far from warm as Miami (she arrives in heels and any lack of warm clothing) and the locals are hicks used to small town ways and so there is immediately a culture clash.

Hill also falls foul of the kind hearted local union representative (Harry Connick) who also conveniently happens to be a widowed single parent.

As time goes by Hill who in effect needs to fire people realises that she can turn the company around by taking a high risk approach but needs to rally the town together and proves to the company that she works for that she is prepared to scrap with them to save the factory.

This is really a fish out of water comedy of a woman who realises that the town has depth and comforts missing in her life. The hunky widowed union rep helps.

This is watchable but it would never amount to above average. The accents were laid on thick, sounded Canadian to me but it there is never anything original in the pudding baked in this movie.